COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 384
He knew it rose out of the Great Deeps. What lay there no man knew. No man had ever gone down into the Deeps and returned.
-
DESTROYERS were behind them now, rolling through the shallow seas a terrifyingly short distance away. Ran could feel their tremendous dark bulk, trembling with latent power, gleaming when sunlight filtered down through the ripples to strike submarine fire from their sides.
The clan did not know it. The clan, like all clans, was too ready to let their leader do the watching for trouble, too ready to believe what their lax minds were eager to believe—that safety was closer than danger, food closer than death, a rest upon sandy clearings closest of all. He would not tell them how near the Destroyers were.
Once, as they fled across an open savannah among the sea-forests, a shadow from high above floated monstrously over the pale green sand, and the clan broke ranks without waiting, for the command, a flurry of silver bodies flashing this way and that into the shelter of the weed.
Everything in the submarine world fled for cover when those shadows passed. They were not Destroyers—in a sense. They came from the Aliens, as Destroyers came, but these killed all things, including man. Even the shark and the barracuda hid, and the dark seal-people who spoke a half-human tongue so softly. Not only mankind had altered in body and mind in the long milleniums since men first took shelter in the ocean, but the warmblooded altered most. The seal-clans and the dolphin tribes filled the underwater with soft murmurs of their primitive talk. They had nothing to fear from the Destroyers; the mission of the Destroyers was the extermination of man alone.
But that shadow was something unknowable which the Aliens themselves rode. Ship, perhaps. No one dared look up to see if a keel printed the dimpling surface or rode high up in Air. That sort of ship carried hunters who preyed on all lives alike. Even the majestic whale, about which nothing was known except his majesty, had all but vanished from the seas after those ships began to pass. All things hid when that shadow slid across the ocean floor, mankind shouldering fish and seal and dolphin alike for shelter among the rocks.
But it passed, and all of the ocean world but man was at peace again. Man fled on.
What were the Aliens? No one knew; no man had any mental picture at all of the inheritors of Earth. They only knew that whenever men met the Destroyers, wherever they met them, there they died. And shark and barracuda fed upon what the inheritors left of those whom Earth bore and those who had ruled her, once.
And might, again.
That was the legend, anyhow; that was what kept men like Ran still fighting, till flying before the Destroyers, still stubbornly welding their clans together and seeking out deeper and farther sanctuaries where their silver-furred children might grow to maturity and pass on to yet another precarious generation the heritage of man.
The Earth-Born shall inherit Earth.
That was the legend; that was the promise. It was all men like Ran had to hold to, and it was little enough. Ran could not even feel sure now that there were any other men left alive except his own fleeing tribe.
Once, it seemed to him, the Destroyers had killed much more casually, almost at random. That was in the old days he could barely remember, when the tribes of men had thronged the shallow, sunlit seas around every coastline. The oldest knew tales their grandfathers had told of a golden age, when men even dared to draw their silver-furred limbs up the beaches—loneliest beaches, of course—and bask in the direct warmth of the sun. Legend said they had even used their voices in these days; they had spoken and sung in air. The old ones remembered great sweeping choruses stronger than the beat of surf, rolling from beach to beach as the throngs of men sunned their silver pelts and joined their voices.
But the Destroyers put an end to it long ago. The great killings of the last few years had been systematic. The machines came down in their thousands, more silently than the shark, and far more deadly, and reaped the clans of ocean as men had once reaped grain in the old, old, forgotten days when the Earth-Born ruled the Earth.
Now the farthest extension of the senses found no quiver of human thought in the waters anywhere. Were these the last? Perhaps; perhaps not. Ran only knew they had come a long, long way down the warm roadway of the Gulf Stream which was mankind's favorite path undersea, and encountered only that one other clan whose deaths still made the memory shiver. Perhaps they were the last.
RAN SWUNG them sharply in a racing spiral around a point of rock, the clan streaming out obediently in a silver ribbon and fleeing on down the long incline through upward-wavering weed. Ran could not stretch out his specialized senses in any direction very far without striking upon the numbing iron presences that prowled the sea-floors, testing the water for their prey.
Patiently he drove his clan along the tribe-ways toward sanctuary. Patiently he sent his promises of safety but. The "Thoughts of the Deep" moved now and then in vast tides through the shadowed water ...
* * * * * *
There was going to be trouble with Dagon. Ran thought of it as he sank slowly through the long cloven shaft after the last of his people. At the foot of the shaft lay the sunken city. The walls of rock through which they reached it were colored dull red and iridescent blue-green from explosions that happened aeons ago. The floor of the cleft was fused green glass.
Ran slipped gently downward, watching the last tired clansmen struggle through weeds toward safety, catching Dagon's confused thoughts above the soft, twittering murmurs of the tribe. In the depths of Dagon's mind, under the confusion, lay something cold and ominous as a barracuda. Fear, mostly, and the potentialities for rage that was not quite human. There can be mutations on the downward path as well as the upward, and in Dagon's mind lay the clear seed of mankind's future.
"Are we fish?" Ran asked himself. "Are we nothing but fear and hunger?"
Dagon had fled as mindlessly as a fish when the Destroyer wiped out his tribe. He should not be swimming this strongly now; he should not be able to. The leader of a clan had no right to this much remaining energy, with his clan so lately wiped out after long flight. A tribe leader should not survive his clan at all.
Ran realized suddenly that he was a little afraid of Dagon—not physically afraid, but afraid in the mind, where reason dwells. Dagon's weakness was a failing the whole tribe was heir to, Ran with the rest. And Dagon's failure could be a foreshadowing of Ran's failure, when the hour of trial came. Would Ran's tribe scatter mindlessly, to be hunted down in the open, like Dagon's? Would Ran—
"No," he told himself resolutely. "We are men. I'll keep us men. As long as we stay alive."
-
HE CAME last out of the shaft down which he had shepherded his people. They hung, panting and uncertain, in a cloud around the cleft-mouth, waiting for him. Dagon floated a little way apart, raking the city before him with keen, quick glances. He knew a good refuge when he saw it.
Here were rank upon rank of high stone towers aquiver with veils of weed. The canyons between the buildings were too narrow for a Destroyer to pass. And there was something in the construction of the towers which confused them a little when their quarry hid among the buildings. Ran connected it vaguely with the silvery gleam of metal that still showed bright when the moss was rubbed from it.
Heretofore the city had been safe; heretofore when the Destroyers crossed a clan's path and unloosed their glittering destruction upon their quarry, any who, by agility and speed could reach a hiding place in this city, or another like it, had survived.
The tribes knew they were cities, knew dimly, with an unthinking racial memory, that they were cities built by men. How, or when, nobody had ever wondered. It did not occur even to Ran that the cities might have been reared on dry land, or that the land had sunk. It was enough that there were cities here at all, to offer the sea clans refuge when they needed it.
Dagon's quick glances glittered with appreciation of the place Ran had guided them to. There was a broken dome a little way off which caught the eye first because of its size, and Dagon's whole silvery bulk twitched impulsively at sight of it. The dome was not a very good refuge, there was no metal remaining in it, and it was too conspicuous. Ran had another shelter in mind, but Dagon gave him no time to direct the clan there.
"Run!" Dagon flashed at the whole tribe, not controlling his thought but sending it out broadcast and scarcely knowing he had uttered the command at all. It was sheer instinct made audible. "Run for the dome! We can hide there while we rest. Everyone—follow me!"
The clan's common impulse toward flight, already keyed to a high, hysterical pitch, made them respond instantly and as unthinkingly as Dagon himself. Every sleek, shining body flashed simultaneously around and lined up for flight toward the polarizing goal of the dome.
Then reason—what reason remained to man—interrupted the impulse, and a few of the tribe paused shivering uncertainly, remembering that Ran's was the voice which commanded them, not Dagon's. Yet Dagon spoke so authoritatively, urged them toward the obvious shelter, speaking for the obvious need—Most of them darted forward, at Dagon's heels.
Ran galvanized his weary muscles and shot forward through the tribe, scattering it in all directions, breaking up the pattern of their flight before it had fully formed. Then he was at their front, wheeling in the water so abruptly that his fur streamed sidewise for a moment as he turned to face them. With all his authority he shouted, "No! No! Not the dome! You know our refuge! I'm your leader, not Dagon. The dome is too open to be safe; head for our tower!"
Blind panic made the foremost deaf to him. It was the foremost who had first responded to Dagon, and the too-quick response showed their hysteria. There was only one kind of order they would hear or respect now.
Ran hurled himself against the nearest, knocking him sidewise, cuffing a second across the face, shouldering a third hand. His thought was a roar in their minds, harsh with authority. "Head for the tower! Listen! Head for the tower!"
The disorganized flight paused, wavered, piled up into a milling cloud around the arrested forward plunge of the foremost. In a moment or two, Ran and Dagon were hanging in the center of a half-hysterical glove of clansmen, a globe that shifted and wavered furiously around the outer edges, while every eye watched what went on in the heart of the crowd, where Ran had brought himself up just short of Dagon.
Dagon swung himself heavily around in the water, letting his pelt loosen a little to increase his bulk. Anger suffused his face wherever human flesh showed through the fur, and his lip lifted over serviceable fangs.
-
IT WAS no time for fighting; Dagon should have known that. The least taint of blood in the water would certainly draw the killer sharks, and almost as certainly the Destroyers themselves. But it was no time for argument, either.
Ran drew his upper lip tight and let his own sharp canines flash. He did not speak directly to Dagon. "You know our refuge," he told his tribe, casting out the thought in his old, encircling way to enfold the whole group. "Follow me."
His thought was a command that moved before him, opening up a path through the hovering globe of clansmen. There was an instant when Dagon's snarl was a challenge to combat that could not be ignored.
But the combat never came.
A tremendous shadow moved across the sea-floor. When its edge touched the intent cloud of sea-people as they hung watching, thoughts interlocked with patternless violence, every silvery body started simultaneously, shivered, and looked up.
Far overhead, distorted by ripples between and hanging just under the surface of the sea, a questing Destroyer sailed slowly, trailing its egg-shaped shadow across the sand.
Squarely above the edge of the cliff where the clan hovered it paused. No one stirred or spoke; no one even thought.
Then slowly, slowly the Destroyer began to sink. It was not sure of them, down there. The metal in the sunken city confused it. But built into its complex body were senses which told it that something flickering below might be its prey...
Ran sent out a tiny, tentative whisper of thought, touching each mind simultaneously. "Steady," he said, "it may pass over. Wait for the signal. When I give the word—scatter." He said "scatter" very, very gently, knowing that even the sound of it in panicky ears might start a rout among his followers.
The clan quivered once in a mind-linked, instantaneous response from every individual agreeing as one. Even Dagon joined. And the Destroyer sank and sank, its shadow growing enormous on the sandy street, among the waver of weeds and the knotting and unknotting of ripple-patterns which sunlight cast from the distant surface.
Thoughts wavered and knotted with the same motion in Ran's mind as he waited tensely, gauging the angles of possible flight, postponing to the last instant the explosion of speed that would scatter most of the tribe and would almost certainly sacrifice a few to the Destroyer while the rest found hiding places.
His thoughts were cold and bitter, like the water. In a part of his mind he was counting over to himself the slowest and the weakest who must be abandoned first if he hoped to save the others. The choice was hard, but he had to make it.
Another part of his thought was tuned to the finest and keenest pitch of listening for some hint of other clans, near or far in the cold, green, glassy world around him. He found nothing. No whisper of human thoughts or human life anywhere, in all the vast silences of ocean, Only the faint clang, far off, of his own thought striking harshly against some ranging Destroyer. Far and near—terribly, fatally near—he could sense the encircling enemy. But by every evidence of human senses, this clan alone remained alive of all the clans of ocean.
This is still sanctuary, he reassured himself, watching the gigantic shadow grow upon the street, rippling across the angles of buildings, spreading like a vast thundercloud above them. We can hide here, and they've never yet caught us when we could hide. But if this last refuge should fail—what then? What then?
Majestically through the water, from deep, deep down in the abysses which no man knew, a long "Thought" of the sea moved like a slow heartbeat, once, twice, three times, and was gone.
The vast dark bulk of the Destroyer hung like Leviathan above them now. Ran drew in his breath to utter the command for flight, but he held it, waiting, watching. The water between the terror-frozen humans and the hovering machine wavered until the machine itself seemed insubstantial, a shadow the waves could dispel. But it was no shadow; and there was no defense but flight.
-
BY THEIR very existence the Aliens who made those machines and sent them into the depths of ocean to hunt down mankind, broke one of Earth's oldest laws—the law of balance. On Earth every creature has its opponent. But nothing under the sea or above it had ever stood against the iron Destroyers. It seemed to offer proof, if proof were needed, that the Aliens came from outside Earth, usurping man's heritage.
It seemed a faint hope now that the Earth-Born might still inherit. The clear light of intellect had already dimmed too much, guttering down in instinctive urges as drove Dagon. But stubbornly, still Ran clung to the ancient legend. The Earth-Born shall inherit the Earth. He had to cling to it. If he gave it up before he could pass it on to the nest in line after him, what was the use of struggling at all?
The Destroyer was close over the tower-tops now. It paused there, probing the weed-clogged streets for the throb of warm-blood hearts down here among the cold-blood hearts. Warm and cold alike cowered in the shelter of the weeds and the ruined buildings, instinct and reason together counciling the silence of death itself.
"When it passes that dome," Ran told himself, "we must scatter. But not until it passes. There's still a chance—it may not find us—"
The tension was growing unbearable, but there was still a chance—
Among the brown weeds a silvery human shape convulsed into an explosion of sudden terror. The weakest mind here snapped at the breaking point between instinct and reason.
"Run! Run! Scatter and run!" Dagon shrieked in one wild red burst of blind frenzy.
It was too much for the tribe. The Destroyer might have passed over but for this; now it knew. Ran's people exploded from their hiding-places like the fragments of some exploding bomb in the streets of the long dead city. The water rang with the shrilling of their incoherent terror.
The Destroyer heaved itself up a little in the water, sending down strong ripples as it moved.
There was one totally unreasoning moment when Ran hung in the water motionless, fighting back his rage at Dagon and remembering his dreams in which he turned to face the Destroyers. Dagon, the animal, had called it down upon them. Ran, the man, lingered perilously, in brief, impotent defiance of the enemy. Why? He did not know; perhaps there was in his mind some foolish longing to prove to the machines that not all men were beasts yet, or creatures who worked by instinct only. But he could prove nothing. The Destroyers did not operate by thought, either; they were like machines, obeying an impulse to exterminate, one built into their fire-fountaining bodies. Only man thought—and not all men.
